Not too long ago, I finally learned about “imposter syndrome”. In layman’s terms, picture a genius with a chronic fear of being a fraud, despite evidence to the contrary. Pretty twisted, right? Well, as soon as I learned about it, images of friends notorious for self-doubt came to mind. How silly they were to view themselves like that. Some grew out of it, but others remain victims to themselves. It dawned on me that I could not picture myself in the same light. But why?
For starters, the syndrome can only be manifested in individuals that doubt their worth and ability to do incredible things, even though we witness their magnificence day in and day out. Zero in on that condition of actually being a kick-ass student. I have sufficient evidence that proves my lack of ass-kicking. At many campuses, it appears to not be a unique issue among select individuals. For a long time, I felt its regularity bred from the fact that misery loves company and students unwittingly spread a quiet hysteria with a mask called “fine” but read “faking it”. But then, I believed it. We were imposters. Tons of us still know less than the proverbial Jon Snow. We became Holden Caulfield’s phonies, experts at shooting the breeze and knowing jack shit about what the hell we were talking about in the first place. We played the hostage to a manufactured unknown, but we honestly were the captor. Sadly, Stockholm syndrome became real as we entered a toxic relationship with our unreal self.
That fantasy consumed me.
I would not categorize those unhealthy opinions about myself as doubt, per se. It was a simpler and crueler emotion that I was unknowingly all too familiar with: fear. I don’t know, how do you even begin to describe it? Some days, it was a sharp pain telling me to not bother trying anything because I would only embarrass myself, or worse, I would embarrass those with the misfortune of my friendship. Other days, it was a deep pit in my stomach that only grew larger as I realized how little I understood about myself and quite possibly every facet of life. Yet still, the chill of loneliness kept me on my toes and indecisive when my words might have actually made my world warmer, but the anticipated rejection made me run. But where was I going? I still have no clue.
Reading my own words now, I cannot help but think, I was a total basket case. Clearly, I was swimming in a sea of self pity, living day to day on woe-is-me-isms. I would spend nights on end reinventing myself in dreams, only to awake the same sad man I was the night before. If I viewed myself this terribly, how bad did I look to others? My appearance probably did not garner any sympathy because I was the poster boy for hypocrisy. I went on, an emotional wreck, pretending things were not only good, but also that I was stable enough to dole out untried advice and unfounded expertise. Social con artistry. What was I swindling? Undeserved attention. Why? I am human and I crave that shit.
It was a problem. My fear created even more vulnerability. I wanted an out. Good friends convinced me that I should not drop out of college. These things, these terribly painful things eating away inside me, do pass. For a time, it seemed as such as I gained a better awareness of my self. My mind was less of a storm. I started feeling healthy. I began looking good. I stopped feeling the need to lie.
Fuck, fear found me, again.
Although I had a better handle on things this time around, my fear evolved. It was more clearly defined and unveiled my deepest desire. I told myself I wanted to venture into science because it is a constantly evolving tool that aids in understanding our universe. But my fear saw right through that. It knew I did not want to understand the universe. It understood the selfish grounds for my pursuit: why the hell am I part of the universe anyway?
It took me ages to realize that I was always asking myself this question on my purpose, but my fear made it absolutely clear. The rote inquiry probably augmented my simultaneous curiosity and disgust with religion. Religion has so many flaws and yet, time and time again, it swayed me by easily giving me a purpose with little to no thinking involved. But that purpose was contrived. My fear thrived off of my intellectual laziness.
The search for a new out started and stopped with meditation. For better or worse, it was already an intermittent habit. When I processed the wealth of benefits it could cultivate, I went into overdrive. I approached it as a sport. It would lead me to self-actualization and greatness. I could finally be comfortable in my own skin. No more fear. No more need to fake it. No more need to lie to myself or anyone else. All I had to do was meditate.
If you practice mindfulness, you are probably wearing an empathetic smile after reading that paragraph. Oh, the folly of the novice. If you enter meditation with the tunnel vision I did, you are bound to fail. And, boy, was I failing. It was not until the fourth day of a ten-day meditation retreat that I realized I had not yet meditated. One does not carry intentions into practice. You will undo the whole mindfulness aspect of the meditation. So I tried it again for the first time in as honest a way I could. Things felt right for a time but I could never be sure. That little seed of doubt waited patiently for me to fail again. My practice continued but the further I delved, the more I wanted to return to old vices. I couldn’t reconcile my deeply rooted desires with my need for change.
Four months into my time in Korea and my escape from Yale, I gave up meditation entirely. Oddly, it did not feel terrible. In the midst of my escape, I started exploring the self in new ways with my bouts of being alone. You know what was funny? The loneliness receded. There are times I still feel “alone” but that former emptiness and the chill of a void seemed to dissipate with each day. I went into long periods of self-examination. I thought about the ways I interacted with people. I thought about the ways I asked questions. I thought about the ways I viewed problems.
Holy shit!
My fear actually guided me to breakthroughs. I started to really tease out the faulty logic I used to reach poor conclusions on arguments that plagued me from days past. The constant rerouting to times I looked the fool distracted me from spending time on topics I knew I was more interested in, delaying a lot of learning. Likewise, I made some really poor decisions that lead to endless worrying over the consequences. The sunk-cost bias regularly foiled me and probably damaged my impression on some great people. I’ll tell you, the liberation that comes with letting go is probably the fastest weight loss program I have ever been on. I stopped focusing on failures that lead to shame, which kept me running from and unaccepting of my reality, and shifted my attention to mistakes. The resulting guilt alleviated the blame I regularly trudged around in and gave me the patience to look at where in the process I slipped up.
Now a lot of this may sound crazy, as it should, but the transition of these changes were very slow moving and arose late into the year. The culmination of these perspective changes really culminated last Friday night. A friend asked me questions on life and posed a fantastic thought: what if there is no meaning to life? Now, I’m not going to force feed you my every philosophy, but tinker with that idea. It is actually very beautiful. People have this somewhat strict condition on how the universe works: there was a beginning and there will be an end. From that, people derived these stories that went from myth to religion to the maxims that guide one’s life. Even science fails to divorce this rule from its foundations. Yes, there very much seems to have been a beginning to the universe, but what separates our universe from stories is the fact that our universe does not have an ending, for now. Attempting to unravel the end with how little we know is noble, but our lack of knowledge is the very thing that makes it unfathomable.
It’s been almost 38 years since Voyager 1 and 2 were sent off into space; Voyager 1 entered interstellar space just a few years ago and Voyager 2 will exit our solar system in due time. This very month, astrophysicists spotted the farthest galaxy (EGS-zs8-1) humans have ever observed with an astonishing formation ~13 billion years ago (for reference, the universe is ~13.8 billion years old). Although our observable universe may seem large, spacetime expansion is only making it more difficult to figure out how much is out there as galaxies become ever further spread out. Here’s the kicker: we can only currently describe ~4 percent of our observable universe. As mind-boggling as our inability to reach, see, or calculate the ends of the universe is, the fact that “we are star stuff”, as Carl Sagan elegantly put it, is not only a great fortunate accident, but also a constant reminder that we have been and always will be. Reflecting on that, sure, it’s pretty easy to think that we were destined to exist or even have meaning. But when you look closely at it, every little detail of the universe is simply the beauty that erupts from the chaos of collisions. We are chance. We are outliers. We are luck.
When I maintained the idea of the meaningful self, I was oblivious to so many things around me and I easily made mistakes. After a lot of reflection and processing, I made some changes so I can appreciate my inevitable mistakes and my endless surroundings. Giving into my fear and letting go of my need for meaning, I am now comfortable with admitting I don’t know anything, but I am also more eager to learn now than ever before.
